The Cave Girl

THE dim shadow of the thing was but a blur against the dim shadows of the wood behind it. The young man could distinguish no outline that might mark the presence as either brute or human.

He could see no eyes, yet he knew that somewhere from out of that noiseless mass stealthy eyes were fixed upon him.

This was the fourth time that the thing had crept from out the wood as darkness was settling — the fourth time during those three horrible weeks since he had been cast upon that lonely shore that he had watched, terror-stricken, while night engulfed the shadowy form that lurked at the forest’s edge.

It had never attacked him, but to his distorted imagination it seemed to slink closer and closer as night fell — waiting, always waiting for the moment that it might find him unprepared.

Waldo Emerson Smith-Jones was not overly courageous. He had been reared among surroundings of culture plus and ultra-intellectuality in the exclusive Back Bay home of his ancestors.

He had been taught to look with contempt upon all that savored of muscular superiority — such things were gross, brutal, primitive.

It had been a giant intellect only that he had craved — he and a fond mother — and their wishes had been fulfilled. At twenty-one Waldo was an animated encyclopedia — and about as muscular as a real one.

Now he slunk shivering with fright at the very edge of the beach, as far from the grim forest as he could get.

Cold sweat broke from every pore of his long, lank, six-foot-two body. His skinny arms and legs trembled as with palsy. Occasionally he coughed — it had been the cough that had banished him upon this ill-starred sea voyage.

As he crouched in the sand, staring with wide, horror-dilated eyes into the black night, great tears rolled down his thin, white cheeks.

It was with difficulty that he restrained an overpowering desire to shriek. His mind was filled with forlorn regrets that he had not remained at home to meet the wasting death that the doctor had predicted — a peaceful death at least — not the brutal end which faced him now.

The lazy swell of the South Pacific lapped his legs, stretched upon the sand, for he had retreated before that menacing shadow as far as the ocean would permit. As the slow minutes dragged into age-long hours, the nervous strain told so heavily upon the weak boy that toward midnight he lapsed into merciful unconsciousness.